If electricity is so fast, how it doesn’t immediately charge up capacitors and batteries?

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I’m pretty aware that this is a “dumb” question, but my basic understanding of electricity can’t figure it out. I know the basic concept of resistance, currency and voltage, but I can’t comprehend how it takes so long to store charge in a battery

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s two separate ‘speeds’ of electricity. One is how fast a voltage can travel, and another is how fast the individual electrons travel. While voltages travel at basically the speed of light, individual electrons take a lot longer to travel. Not only that, but you need a looooooot of electrons to completely fill up a battery or capacitor. The speed of an individual electron only tells you how fast it takes for the first electron to arrive at the destination, it doesn’t tell you how fast you can charge a battery or capacitor that has a capacity of billions of electrons.

To find that out, you need to know how many electrons you can send at once, which is dependent on the maximum current your charging cable is capable of.

Think of an analogy where you want to fill a giant bucket full of baseballs. You hire a pitcher to throw one baseball at a time into the bucket. While each individual baseball moves very quickly, you can see how it would take a very long time for a single pitcher to fill up a giant bucket. To increase the filling rate, you need to spend more money to hire more pitchers, or hire more expensive pitchers that can throw more balls each hour. But even then you have a limited budget and a really big bucket so it still takes a long time.

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